Welcome To This Brand New, Original Series Featuring 3 Dental Marketing Leaders In An Uncensored, No-Holds Barred Discussion That Cuts Through Misinformation & Confusion, Providing The Clarity You Desperately Need For Marketing Your Practice The Right Way, Right Now

Dental Marketing Defined! In this crucial episode, you’ll learn:

Why your website is now simply a glorified brochure, and the online tools you can’t afford to ignore

Graig: If we want to define dental marketing, I think that’s sort of something and I’ve talked about this in my lectures and my speaking, I feel like that’s something that lives above our heads in the ether that we can’t grab but we say at cocktail parties and the bar and it sounds like it’s important but we never really quantify it and break that down.

I think for everyone who’s engaged in this conversation with us we really confuse what a promotion is versus what is actually marketing versus what is actually static marketing that’s always consistent and for me the biggest offender of this is the dental website because to me, it’s an absolute necessity to have a quality mobile responsive compliant website, but a website is no longer dental marketing.

Josh: No. It’s information.

Graig: It’s information and I think a lot of folks think that if they just get a website or redesign a site that all of a sudden that phone in the corner is just going to start exploding.

Josh: It’s not a baseball field in Iowa; you can’t just build it and expect people to come in.

Graig: Exactly.

Josh: Marketing is what gets people to look at your website. How do you get eyes on your website because that’s where your information lives?

Graig: Right. In this day and age, it’s just a glorified brochure.

Josh: Absolutely.

Graig: It’s no different than the pamphlet you put in the corner talking about Care Credit because that’s information. Are people going to read it? Absolutely. Should it be well-written and well-designed? Absolutely, but it should not be something that you put all of your eggs in one basket and think it’s going to change.

Josh: That can’t be your sole marketing.

Graig: Absolutely not and I think the flip side of that is that dental marketing shouldn’t be promotional. It shouldn’t be ‘oh we’re going to do a new patient special this month’. That’s not marketing, that’s an advertisement. That’s a promotion.

Marketing in my mind and I’d like to get your opinion on this, is a system that is repeatable and trackable.

Josh: Yes, which is hard. The tracking is hard all because a lot of times you have somebody in your chair and you ask them to write down where they heard about your office, they’re going to say the Internet.

Graig: What does that even mean?

Josh: So you’ve got to do some more. It takes effort to track but you don’t know what’s working if you don’t track. So that’s an important thing and Local Search For Dentists®; are really big about helping us figure out how to track.

So those are some of the systems that I’ve gotten from you guys that have really helped as far as recognizing the case. The dollars I’m spending, are they resulting in butts and chairs? So tracking gets difficult.

You say that marketing shouldn’t always be promotional and I like the idea of more emotional marketing. It’s not so much about the offer, it’s not so much about how cheap it is or what free toothbrush or whitening they’re going to get, it’s more about what emotional connection can I make with somebody that’s going to trigger that center in their brain to make them do the thing that’s uncomfortable which is go to an appointment to a place they don’t want to go and they think is going to hurt or be too expensive or inconvenient or whatever like, what can we get them to overcome all those barriers and it’s not going to be a deal generally, it’s going to be an emotional connection.

So I think taking the promotion out of marketing and making it more emotional is going to get you way more conversions than just the $99 new patient special.

Graig: I think that’s a good point. I think that is something that people- you have to remember when they come to visit you, they’re interrupting their entire day, so we want to play to the emotion of it which is what is imperative. You might trigger their interest with a special but we need to have something in place that’s a repeatable system and going back to the tracking, just some hard takeaways for everyone which is, if you don’t work with an agency which I obviously recommend that you do, there’s a lot of good ones out there, is having your analytics report from all of your Google properties and tracking your phone calls because the reality of that situation is to your point about on the intake form, someone just write internet.

Well, I know when I go to a business and they say ‘oh if you don’t mind me asking, how you find us?’ Half the time, I don’t remember and then most of the time I make it up because I don’t remember.

So that’s not really tracking. Tracking should be data that is based on hard facts which we know we can get that from Google and putting tracking data out there. Like you said, we help you with your tracking. So you know ok I’m putting butts in seats, my return on investment is good.

Asking the patient how they found you is fine but I don’t think relying on that is a good idea. Pulling that report out of your dental software and relying solely on that, I think can give you a lot of false positives because you’re going to see a lot of referral internet and you’re not going to understand really. You’re relying on the patient which is a human element which in my mind when I’m always looking at tracking, I really don’t want to rely on a human because we all make mistakes, whereas I’d rather rely on some harder data and then I think you lay it all out and then you make a deduction from there.

Josh: When I get my report from you guys every month, one of the things I like looking at is the call logs so I can tell who makes phone calls from what they read on Google and at what times and how long the phone calls last because you know if it’s 14 seconds, it wasn’t long enough to make a new patient make an appointment and you can see when the bolus of calls are, the weird outlier that calls at 2:35 in the morning or whatever and you’re sucking like what lead did I lose by not having somebody there to answer the phone at 2:35, all that kind of stuff but it’s robust data that I can sit and really look at and it always just strikes me of how many pages of phone calls there are just from that Google listing and how many people funneled from that and how important and vital that stream of patients is to my practice.

Graig: Yes. The other cool part about that is you can see maybe during lunch hour, you’ll get an influx of calls and maybe some of them were not answered or people are calling maybe at the tail end of a day just when you close your doors and you’re missing out on maybe booking an extra two to three appointments for the next time around and then you can figure out do we need to stage our phone time a little bit?

Josh: Maybe stagger our staff a little bit by 30 minutes up or down.

Graig: And that’s real buyer behavior. That’s real data that a lot of the large media companies pay millions of dollars to get access to, we’re providing to the local dentist so that you can understand really where people are coming from and where that little hole in your bucket is and maybe you’re missing money.

So just to wrap everything up for everybody, I think that the key takeaway here is making sure that you understand that you’re tracking hard data and that isn’t speculative in terms of asking every patient. Still do that but make sure whatever agency you’re working with, you know exactly how many phone calls you’re getting, you know exactly the traffic numbers and you’re paying pretty good attention to that month in and month out and I think you’ll have really good success for that.

I want to help you put an action plan together to get your practice moving in the right direction. Do NOT be a stick in the mud, who refuses to change. This year can be that year for change. Let’s do it!

One word of WARNING: This action plan will disappear with out notice! So don’t delay.

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